Denial: Reflections on a Movie and a Trial

Description

Denial, a British movie directed by Mick Jackson from a screenplay by David Hare, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2016. Starring Timothy Spall, Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson, it tells the story of a celebrated libel action brought before the High Court in London by writer David Irving over accusations of Holocaust denial levelled against him by American academic Deborah Lipstadt. In this lecture, Richard Evans (the principal expert witness in the trial, played in the movie by John Sessions), reflects on the screen adaptation and the trial, and their relationship to one another.

Richard J. Evans, is a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and the Douglas Southall Freeman Professor of History at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and Provost of Gresham College in the City of London. He is the author of numerous books on modern German history, including Telling Lies about Hitler. The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial (Verso, 2002). His most recent book is The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914(Penguin Books, 2016). He is currently completing a biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm.